Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Goldsmiths launches £10,000 literary prize

23.01.13 | Joshua Farrington - The Bookseller

A new £10,000 literary prize rewarding original fiction has been launched by Goldsmiths, University of London. The Goldsmiths Prize will be given to a book which “opens up new possibilities of the novel form”. It will be awarded each year to a book that is deemed “genuinely novel and which embodies the sprit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.”The prize is supported by the New Statesman, and open to all publishers and imprints. For the inaugural prize, any novel published in 2013 can be submitted and it will be judged by novelists Nicola Barker and Gabriel Josipovici, New Statesman culture editor Jonathan Derbyshire, and Goldsmiths’ Dr Tim Parnell. Derbyshire said: “The New Statesman is delighted to be supporting a prize that rewards invention and innovation in fiction – qualities that the magazine has long promoted in its literary pages. We are especially pleased to be entering into partnership with an institution as forward-looking as Goldsmiths.”Blake Morrison, poet, author and professor of creative and life writing at Goldsmiths, commented: “A number of innovative and prize-winning young novelists and poets have emerged from our creative writing programme, and the inauguration of the Writers’ Centre is a recognition that writing at Goldsmiths has an increasingly high profile. As to the new prize, we hope it will encourage more risk-taking among novelists, editors and agents alike. There’s an idea that innovative and genre-busting books are bound to be inaccessible. We don’t believe that’s the case.”The shortlist will be announced in October 2013, with the winner chosen in November.